


walking through walls

by shuofthewind



Series: The Making of Monsters [SIDEFICS] [4]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Drabble, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Fluff, I Have No Excuses This Time, Literal Sleeping Together, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-14
Updated: 2015-10-14
Packaged: 2018-04-26 08:06:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4997119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuofthewind/pseuds/shuofthewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sleeping isn't something that really comes naturally anymore. Maybe it never did.</p><p>[Or, the one where people sleep a lot.]</p><p>[<em>The Price of War</em> 'verse. Companion piece. Darcy POV. I have no excuse for this shameless fluff other than it's extasiswings' fault.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	walking through walls

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for: implications of sexual harassment, references to rape culture, references to drunkenness/alcoholism, remembered murder, some body horror, nightmares, night terrors, imagined death, post traumatic stress disorder that goes WILDLY ignored, some mentions of violence/bruises. 
> 
> No plot, just musings and fluff. Just saying that now. 
> 
> Title from "Monsters" by Matchbook Romance. 
> 
> Again, unbeta'ed.

She’s never actually been all that good at sleeping. She doesn’t ever have to think about why, either. She never really talks about it, because she’s not entirely sure how to explain it—not to Foggy or Matt, anyway—but she knows precisely why. When you have a mother with a flair for picking out the worst possible sex-partners, the genes for early-onset boobage, and a tendency of living in bad neighborhoods, you learn pretty damn fast how to snap awake when you hear someone in your space.

Okay, that sounds terrible. Nothing ever happened to her. Sometimes her mother’s boyfriends would get creepy, and watch her for too long, and on one memorable occasion Isaiah (the most harmless out of all of them, despite the fact that—or maybe because—he’d been the one to teach her to shoot) had mixed up her room with her mother’s and nearly tripped into her bed. But nobody ever touched her, and she’d never felt threatened, exactly. Highly uncomfortable, but not threatened. Even after moving up to New York, Darcy’s never been able to shake the habit of snapping awake when she hears someone else in the hall, or hears a doorknob turn, or some part of her realizes that she’s not alone anymore.

Staying with Foggy and Matt had occasionally been nightmarish, because of that. She trusts them—she trusts them absolutely, her boys, she’d never, ever think either of them would do anything to make her uncomfortable or try to hurt her—but habits don’t just go away. Throw in her nightmares, about anything, really—Eli, her mother, odd twisting pipe dreams with labyrinths and monsters—and she spends a lot of time on the very edge of sleep, resting rather than dreaming.

When it all starts, Wesley and Fisk and the devil of Hell’s Kitchen, it gets worse. (Well, it gets worse and it gets better, but first, it gets worse.) When she closes her eyes she just sees a whirl of reality, which—somehow—has become more nightmarish than anything her mind can dream up. Lies and masks and monsters, tears and knives and blood. Eli keeps coming at her out of the dark, shouting. _You could have said something. You knew. You let me die._ She can’t breathe when she wakes up, sometimes. She doesn’t cry, but god, sometimes she snaps out of bed like she’s been electrocuted and all she wants to do is scream. Sometimes when she knows Jen is asleep, she presses her face into her pillow and does just that, screams and screams, until her throat burns and she can’t breathe.

( _—you could have stopped it but you let me die—_ )

After she learns the truth, though, after the fight is over and she starts her slow, unacknowledged shift into Matt’s apartment, it’s…different. It’s not just that her nightmares are worse ( _—a knife against her throat in the dark, walk away or watch them die, if my associates and I escort you from this coffee shop in broad daylight how long do you think you have, I called and called and you didn’t answer, blood and smoke and burning flesh, I’m going to kill you—_ ), because they are, there’s no denying that. With everything she sees, now, everything she knows, they’re not going to get better, either. There’s just a slow, creeping sense that something’s different, and she’s not even sure what it is until she falls asleep one night alone, and wakes up at her alarm the next morning to find Matt’s curled his arm around her waist and his nose is resting in the crook of her neck. She blinks, slowly, not entirely sure why that’s so startling, until she realizes—she hadn’t even heard him come in. She’d _slept through it_ , through all of it, the door to the roof and the disentanglement from his suit (because Matt had been out working, last night, and she’d stayed in for once so she could get some things done on a legal case, instead). No matter how quiet Matt can be, she’s never slept through him coming back, before.

Matt presses his lips to her throat, not trying to start anything, just a touch. “You okay?”

Darcy thinks about that, as she whacks at the alarm. Once it shuts up, she rolls over, prodding Matt until she’s half on top of him, resting her cheek against his shoulder. He usually wears a T-shirt to sleep, but the fabric’s ridden up over his waist, and there’s a new bruise there, about the size of a fist, the color of a ripe plum. She touches her fingers to it. “I’m okay, I think.”

Matt strokes his thumb over the back of her shoulder. He’s doing that thing with his mouth that means he’s thinking, half a frown, half not. Darcy sketches a pattern over his clavicle with two fingertips, zig-zags, mostly. She has to get up—she has a meeting with Marci, of all people—but she’s tangled in warmth and blankets and Matt’s breathing quietly in her ear, so she really doesn’t want to.

Matt resettles, sets his lips to her hair. “What is it?”

She reaches across him, draws his hand onto the top of the blankets. It’s getting easier to say, somehow. “I love you,” Darcy tells his hand. “That’s all.”

Matt goes still, just for a moment. This time when he touches his mouth to her hair, she can feel a smile twitching at the corners. “That’s all?”

“Don’t be an ass,” she says, but she’s smiling too.

She starts thinking about it a bit more after that, though. Sleep and rest and nightmares. The way she’ll wake up before him, sometimes. She can remember that night in undergrad, when she’d come so close to learning the truth. ( _I won’t ask. But I’ll stay with you, if you need me to._ ) She’s not entirely sure why she’d noticed so many things that night while missing everything else—the blood that had been under Matt’s fingernails, the smell of dirt and dust and copper, the way his knuckles had been so sore and bruised—but when she thinks back, it’s not the lies that really catch her interest. It’s that she _slept_. She hadn’t really realized at the time what that meant, that she’d slept through without waking. Or that Matt had. She’d discounted it as stress and exhaustion, but now she has more evidence, it’s piling up, that she _sleeps_ when Matt is around. She snaps awake if anyone else comes into her space, but if it’s Matt, she just sleeps right through it.

(He doesn’t wake up for her, either, which is somehow better. Having senses like Matt’s—it’s a miracle he can sleep at all, sometimes. “I’ve tried loads of things,” he says. “Noise cancellation headphones work, sometimes, but—but then I can’t hear it if someone’s coming.” The fact that he sleeps through her coming to bed, or dozes, at least, waking up just enough to curl into her and then falling away again—that’s a kind of trust she’s never had from another person before, and god, some nights she feels like her insides are going to shake into pieces with the overwhelming sense of it.)

It’s not like he magically fixes her, though. She’s pretty sure that even if she gets decades of therapy and possibly brainwashed into forgetting all of it, she’s never going to be fixed. She has nightmares and jumps awake at the slightest sound outside, cats and barking dogs and blaring car alarms. The city’s louder than it’s ever been, mostly because she listens to it, now. She sleeps less than she ever has, falls into bed exhausted, and still snaps awake with Eli or Fisk or Hironobu Orihara screaming in her face. Usually she can settle again, easily enough—that, or clamber out of bed and get to work, because sometimes that’s the only thing that helps—but some nights? Some nights are bad. Not just bad, but _bad_ , as terrible as the things that caused them, Nobu with his blade, Fisk’s hands around her throat, the crack of the gun and the flicker of a knife and blood trickling out from between Matt’s gloved fingers.

Matt’s silent in his nightmares, for the most part, snapping awake with a live wire of tension running from his throat to his fists to his feet, clenched everywhere, ready to fly. That’s when she starts waking up, again. She’s not sure if it’s a sound he makes, or the sudden tension where there was none before, but she snaps awake if it happens. On the worst nights, he’ll leave the bed and run the shower for longer than usual, maybe twenty minutes, maybe thirty, before coming back with wet hair and a strange, hollow silence. He doesn’t talk about them, and she doesn’t ask, but she’ll listen to him breathing, and usually he’ll rest his hand over her heart, as if he’s trying to remind himself that it’s beating.

She thinks he might dream the same sorts of things she does. She thinks, on those nights, that he might dream of her dying. She knows she’s had nightmares where he dies. She calls those nights _horror shows_ , because she only ever sees them dead. Kate and Claire, Karen and Foggy and Jen, and Matt, _Matt_ , dead before she can get to them, Eli’s father laughing, Fisk laughing, Vanessa laughing, and she can never stop it. Not ever in time. 

On her bad nights, during the horror shows, she _screams._ She hates it. She’ll wake up still screaming with Matt pressed in close, making soft, half-human sounds, pushing his nose into her hair, breathing. Usually that yanks her back to reality, but once she punches him in the face before he can catch her. It’s a good punch; she gives him a nosebleed that doesn’t stop for a good hour, and she hates herself for it even though for some ridiculous reason he seems pleased that she managed it.

She’s honestly surprised that none of his neighbors have called the police about it. Darcy doesn’t cry, exactly, but she doesn’t fall asleep again after those. She just wraps herself as close as she can, listening to his lungs work, and tries to tell herself that it’s only a nightmare. It doesn’t work that well when half of what she sees is based entirely in reality.

It’s late December when Matt sets a hand to her shoulder, rocking her gently out of sleep. Darcy rolls over, and blinks at him. He’s still in his slacks and button-down, probably just now coming in from the living room and the table they’ve turned into a third desk, but the first few buttons of his shirt are undone and his tie is missing. He’s not—watching her, exactly, but his head is tipped, and his lips are pressed tight together. It makes her wonder. Darcy reaches out, curls her fingers into the fabric of his shirt. “What?”

Matt licks his lips. “You were dreaming.”

She feels muzzy. “I don’t remember.”

He rests his knees on the floor by the bed, and strokes her hair, absently. “It didn’t sound good.”

That, at least, she can believe. There’s an odd sick feeling in her stomach that only ever comes with Eli dreams. “Thanks.” She catches his hand on its next pass down. “You’re still awake.”

“Work wasn’t done.”

“What time is it?”

Matt tips his head a little bit, something crooked creeping across his face. “I don’t know. The clock is a mystery to me.”

“Ugh, sass.” She lifts herself up on her elbow, and curls her hand around the back of his neck, kissing the corner of his mouth. Matt turns into her, his lips curving a little. “Quit with the sass when I’m not awake.”

“I try, but there are some things that can’t be stopped.”

Darcy rolls her eyes. When she pulls back, there’s still an odd, frightened look to him, not in his expression, but in the way he's angled, shoulders back, like he's ready to throw himself into a fight. She wonders exactly what he heard, from this dream she can’t remember. “Hey.” She touches her fingers to his cheek. “Come sleep.”

“I still need to type everything up.”

“I’m faster at typing than you. I can do it in the morning.” Her ribs ache. The bruise from a fight near St. Patrick’s is finally showing its true colors, and she _hates_ bruises. When she catches his hand again and sets it to her cheek, turns her face into his palm to press her lips to the skin there, he lets out a shaking breath. “Stay with me.”

Matt’s lips part, just for a moment. His fingers flicker against her jaw. “It’s not a good night,” he says. “For me.”

“Then it’s not a good night,” she says. “But I still sleep better when you’re here.”

He laughs once, silent. Matt draws his thumb over the line of her cheekbone. “That sounds familiar.”

“I can’t help that you occasionally have really smooth lines.”

“Occasionally,” he repeats, but the smile gets bigger. It’s still small, but it’s not shaky anymore. “ _Occasionally_.”

“I could have said rarely. Take the compliment.”

“I’m not entirely sure that was one.”

“Come to bed, you loser,” Darcy tells him. Matt leans forward and kisses her, once, twice.

“You don’t have to yell.”


End file.
